WW II Journal: Framingham man went from Normandy to Buchenwald

Monday

Jun 16, 2014 at 12:01 AM

By Brad PetrishenDaily News Staff

(Editor's note: World War II Journal is a weekly series running Mondays detailing the experiences of local veterans in the war.)The world remembers D-Day on anniversaries like this month’s 70th, when TV specials air and politicians make speeches.It remembers the Holocaust with memorials and ceremonies, and black-and-white videos shown in history classes.Men like Framingham’s Isadore Cutler remember them all the time, with all five senses, try as he might to forget."You live through it again for the rest of your life," said Cutler, who was 19 years old when he scrambled onto Omaha Beach on June 6, 1944. "It’s embedded in your head."Cutler, "Eddie" to his wife Phyllis and most everybody else, is a friendly 89-year-old Jewish man who spent most of his life in the dry cleaning business."A quiet life," Phyllis said this week over the hum of their vintage GE refrigerator, the same one they bought when they moved into their home on Karal Drive six decades ago.But the stories her slender, white-haired husband has to tell are haunting, and the images they conjur are anything but quiet."All I could see was bodies floating around," Cutler said of Omaha Beach, remembering the blood in the water and the pounding in his chest.D-Day was the first time the young man was given the task of putting dead soldiers in body bags. It wouldn’t be his last."I realized what war was all about that day," Cutler said. "Death."Cutler said that, with a sky "black" with planes and Germans still shooting, he and others were ordered to retrieve dead soldiers from the sea."We were sitting ducks," he said, recalling trying to do his job quickly so that he could survive.Cutler, who had originally enlisted at 18, was a truck driver for the Signal Battalion, transporting supplies and men as the Army advanced across France and into Germany.He remembers seeing the French city of St. Lo – an important strategic point – nearly destroyed by Allied bombs."The entire town was destroyed except for one building," he recalled – a church.Cutler’s unit didn’t fight at the Battle of the Bulge. However he said he was ordered to help clean up after the "Malmedy Massacre" in December 1944, in which Germans murdered 84 American prisoners of war."We had to pick up parts of the bodies and put them in bags," he said. "I don’t know how they put the parts together."It’s another thing that makes you sick."Even more sickening was what Cutler witnessed when his outfit reached the Buchenwald Concentration Camp in Weimar, Germany, soon after it was liberated.There, the Jewish American saw Jews and other prisoners, "living skeletons walking around," along with piles and piles of dead bodies and human bones."You could see the maggots coming out of the earth eating the bones," said Cutler, who was tasked with putting chemicals around the bones as he covered his mouth from the putrid stench."They stripped them of everything," Cutler said. "They just threw them in the pit like they were garbage."Cutler remembered survivors eating rotting fruit filled with maggots from barrels they found in an officer’s camp even after they had been fed by their liberators."Even though they had just eaten, they’re scooping it up eating it, because they don’t realize they’re going to get food again," he said.Cutler said Americans forced civilians of a nearby town to come to the camp to confront what they had allowed to happen next door."They said they didn’t know what was going on," Cutler said, cringing. "The truth of the matter was you could smell it 20 miles away."Cutler says he was able to push the images from the war from his mind more easily as a younger man. But now, when programs about the war pop up on TV, Phyllis often turns them off."I have a big problem trying to sleep," he said.But though it’s always a painful experience, Cutler feels a duty to tell the story when asked. He recently told it to a crowd of Jews and Christians at a Holocaust Remembrance ceremony at his temple that included Holocaust survivors."They had some pretty brutal stories to tell," he said.Cutler also told the group something he said has weighed on his conscience for years. One night he was part of a group of soldiers who fired at a group of German soldiers near their camp in the dark.The next morning, he said, the soldiers discovered they had killed a great number of Germans."It haunts me that I may have killed someone human like me," Cutler said. "(My Rabbi) said I was just doing my job, and that as a soldier I was forgiven."Cutler was awarded numerous medals for his service, including France’s highest honor, The Legion of Honor, last summer.A week shy of his 90th birthday, he recently took a trip down to Washington D.C. with the Honor Flight organization to visit the World War II memorial and other landmarks."I wouldn’t give that up for anything," he said, recalling people who lined the sides of the airport terminal to cheer for him and other veterans. "I was thrilled to take that trip."Brad Petrishen can be reached at 508-490-7463 or bpetrishen@wickedlocal.com. Follow him on Twitter @BPetrishen_MWDN.